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This came in from our ace webmistress, Julia Bannon, along with a rather thrilled e-mail about how Blogger had phoned her back and were working with her to debug the various issues (they'd found some broken HTML code from february, for example). Anyway, this is the bit she asked me to post.

"Dear NG.com readers - thank you all so very much for your emails about the archives going 'missing'. Turns out they've never really been gone, but due to some sort of time-stamp technical issue over at Blogger, they haven't been feeding correctly to us for awhile. Apparently they will be doing some beta testing of their new version with a fix for this issue in the next few weeks, so hopefully the problem will be solved relatively soon. I can manually fix the archives so they show up in the list, but you can also type in the url for the month or two you may be missing (if you want the May archive, and you see this URL - http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/2002_06_01_archive.asp, then simply replace the "06" with an "05", and the May journal should pop right up). But every time there's a new post the problem crops up again...so its tough to do all the time. I apologize for not being able to reply to each one of you when you've told me about this problem, but I wanted to make up for it by asking Neil to post this for me. "

Got that?

Hello Neil,

Don't know if you've heard about this yet; but, because it won for best animated feature at the Oscars, SPIRITED AWAY is getting rereleased this Friday (3/28) to a wider market. (I've heard something around 800 screens) Seeing that you did such a wonderful job creating an English script for PRINCESS MONONOKE, I thought you'd like to know in case you haven't seen it.

I really love this film along with all of the other Miyazaki films I've seen. Could you please mention it on the blog at least, so that other people who never heard of it might go out to see it. It sure is a good film that needs our support. (Who knows. In a few years we might get a wide release for HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE when it comes out if this film does well in the coming weeks.)

Thanks and peace,

Joe J.

I was absolutely thrilled for Mr Miyazaki. (I still think it was a pity that Mononoke couldn't be nominated, as it had already been entered in a best foreign film category a couple of years earlier.)

hello, big fan, two questions.
1: you mentioned working on a shadow novella, do you know if/when/how it will come out and how people will be getting it? (IE, will it be hidden in a collection or released on it's own or such)
2: I am attempting to be a writer, and am up to thirteen rejection letters for about ten separate short stories. I have a friend who has made it a goal to recieve twenty five rejection letters this year, I am aiming lower, for around ten. My question for you is, did you recieve any? and if so how many before your first published story/book/comic? (if the answer is zero, feel free to lie and say it's like forty, that would make me feel much better about myself)
please keep up the good work. -jacob.

It'll be in Robert Silverberg's LEGENDS II collection. Which may or may not be called that. Someone sent me a link a couple of days ago to the UK cover on Amazon.co.uk, but I'll let interested people go and find it themselves. According to Amazon.co.uk it'll be out in August, but that doesn't really mean that it will be.

And yes, I got rejection letters. I probably had about half a dozen before I sold my first short story.

Given how popular your blog is do you now feel obligated to blog?

Toby

I was going to say no, but I sort of do. At least, in the old days I'd often not post for a day or so here or there: these days I sort of feel that if I don't post at all, I ought to have a good excuse, because I know how many people are reading the thing, and I feel guilty. Having said that, it's still fun, and it doesn't feel like some kind of genuine weighty obligation. It's still a nice way to warm up my typing fingers in the morning, to share cool news or to answer questions.

A small thing for wordgeeks (who probably knew this already) but I was trying to figure out an etymology today (was fascinated to discover that different dictionaries have utterly different derivations of Quandary -- some derive it from Icelandic and Old English, and some from Latin) and found http://www.etymonline.com/, an online etymological dictionary.